Development of Regional Water Shortage Management Responses and Recommended Phased Response Methods. Special Publication 2013-SP8

摘要

The St. Johns River Water Management District (SJRWMD, or the District) retained Simmons Environmental Consulting (SEC) to perform a literature review of water shortage determination methodologies and an analysis of District data, and to provide recommendations to improve its water shortage monitoring and response methods. The focus of the Literature Review was to identify methodologies to select water shortage indicators, develop and analyze thresholds for each indicator; and to identify water shortage conditions based on indicators and thresholds. Using the literature, SEC provided definitions for different types of drought: meteorologic, agricultural, and hydrologic and presented commonly used indicators and thresholds used to determine drought. Because 90% of withdrawals in the District are from the Upper Floridan Aquifer (UFA), the focus of this study was on identifying methodologies used to develop and analyze indicators and thresholds for hydrologic drought. Except for methodologies used by other water management districts, methodologies identified in the literature applied to drought rather than to water shortage. But in all cases, the use of percentiles to establish threshold levels to identify hydrologic conditions and to define drought and water shortage phase conditions was prevalent. Therefore, SEC used percentiles to establish phase conditions for the UFA. Then, SEC developed and analyzed indicators, triggers, and phase sequencing using District-provided data for the Middle St. Johns Groundwater Basin from January 1998 to December 2012.